Stop Telling Palestinians to Be Resilient — The World Has Failed Them

“Promoting Palestinians’ resilience instead of holding Israel accountable for breaches of international law, international community masks its own failures”

On Monday, as the US Embassy was opened in Jerusalem, Israeli security forces killed at least 58 Palestinians and wounded more than 2,700 demonstrators who gathered at the border fence between Gaza and Israel.

The White House blamed the killings on Hamas, the group in control of Gaza, saying that it had mobilized the protesters.

Brendan Ciarán Browne of Trinity College Dublin writes for the Conversation about the context around the latest episode since the State of Israel was created — and Palestine disappeared — in 1948:

Viewed from Palestine, it’s hard to disagree that we’ve perhaps seen one of the most inflammatory weeks in recent memory. In just a few days, several extremely sensitive events have coincided to devastating effect: the culmination of weekly protests in the Gaza Strip, the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba (from the Arabic, “Immense Catastrophe”) and the start of the holy month of Ramadan. Throw in for good measure Israel and Iran’s recent clash over the occupied Golan Heights and it seems that more than ever, the region is something of a tinderbox.

As 800 guests arrived in Jerusalem to bear witness to the US embassy’s relocation – 33 of them representatives from foreign embassies – protesters in the Gaza Strip were being shot and killed. In what’s been dubbed the Great March of Return, Palestinians in Gaza (the vast majority of whom are refugees, or descended from refugees) have amassed at the edge of the territory to demand their right of return, a right that is protected under international law. So far, their demands have been met with a brutal show of force, with more than 50 Palestinians shot dead, including children, paramedics and journalists.

Much is being made of the US’s decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and perhaps rightly so. Undoubtedly, that change is symbolically resonant. But there is a risk that focusing too narrowly on that issue will obscure a far deeper issue: the continued destruction of the fabric of Palestinian society and ongoing attacks on Palestinian civil liberties.

As others have reported, the embassy move does little to change the actual reality of Palestinians living under occupation in the city. What it does do is remove any naive notion that the US is acting as an honest broker for peace.

Those who are calling the embassy move the death of the two-state solution would do well to look more critically at recent history. Israel has aggressively ramped up the construction of settlements; the Israeli military has killed scores of Palestinian protesters in Gaza (not just this week), and civilian infrastructure has been damaged and destroyed across the Occupied Territories. All the while, world governments have failed to hold Israel to account.

Instead, as Israel entrenches its occupation, the Palestinian National Authority continues its state-building efforts and the international development industry’s failures become clear, the Palestinians are being asked to develop a greater capacity for “resilience”.

The “Resilience” Agenda

Resilience, it seems, is the buzzword of the day. It’s particularly popular in the field of international development, where it’s used to evoke a capacity to “bounce back”, survive, or more optimistically “thrive” in the face of extreme adversity. International organisations have turned their attention to promoting “resilience” both individually and at community level, to better equip people to cope and overcome adversity.

Looking at the state of Palestinian society and standards of living today, it’s abundantly clear that the international development sector has failed in its mission. And yet a “resilience industry” has taken hold in Palestine, and the discourse of resilience is everywhere. It has crept into the operational language of major international organisations, including the United Nations Development Program, an organization that recently hosted two major international conferences focusing on the development of Palestinian resilience.

This agenda is disingenuous on a number of levels, and as it becomes a driving force in the international development agenda in Palestine, it needs to be viewed more critically than it currently is. For a start, it’s not clear how its achievements are to be evaluated. But more than that, Palestinians don’t need lessons in resilience from an international community that has utterly failed in its stated mission.

By promoting Palestinian resilience instead of holding Israel accountable for its multiple breaches of international law, and its involvement in the destruction of Palestinian society, the international community is masking its own failures – and shamefully abdicating its responsibility to the people it claims to be helping.

Dr Emma Keelan contributed to this article. She is currently pursuing an MA in Global Health at the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian Conflict Response Institute. Her research involves conducting fieldwork on Palestine, resilience and international NGOs.

About The Author

Scott Lucas is Professor of International Politics at the University of Birmingham and editor-in-chief of EA WorldView. He is a specialist in US and British foreign policy and international relations, especially the Middle East and Iran. Formerly he worked as a journalist in the US, writing for newspapers including the Guardian and The Independent and was an essayist for The New Statesman before he founded EA WorldView in November 2008.

5 Comments

Don Cox
on May 15, 2018 at 11:52

So far as the Gazans are concerned, it’s Hamas that has failed them. That organisation has become a front for the Iranian government and their anti-Israel policies.

Iran is using the young men of Gaza as cannon fodder, making them attack Israel unarmed so as to get headlines from the inevitable deaths. There is really no need for Gazans to attack Israel at all. They are not under occupation. Gaza has everything to gain and nothing to lose from making peace with Israel.

The conflict predates the very existence of Hamas by at least 30 years and 40 years before the Iranian revolution.

Who are you going to blame for that? Anti semitism?

No one attacked Israel. Israel shot unarmed Gazans hundreds of meters from the fence. Israel has in fact broken every ceasefire since 2008 to carry out what they affectionately refer to “mowing the lawn” in Gaza every few years to keep the Palestinians desperate and destitute.

Gaza has everything to gain and nothing to lose from making peace with Israel.

How is Gaza supposed to do that? Hamas have already proposed a long term truce and officially backed a 2ss solution. It is Israel that rejects it and any kind of peace deal.